Clifford Owens, Zoe Leonard, and more artists won 2020 Guggenheim fellowships.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced the winners of its 2020 Guggenheim Fellowships. The highly coveted fellowship welcomes a manifold group of 175 writers, scholars, artists, and scientists, that range from 53 scholarly and artistic disciplines. With individuals drawn from 78 academic institutions, the fellowship announcement also notes that nearly 60 of the fellows have “no full-time college or university affiliation.”

A significant accomplishment in one’s career, the 96th edition of the fellowship includes a number of accomplished, critically acclaimed, and formally ambitious artists. Artists Steffani Jemison and Sky Hopinka are fellows; Jemison participated in last year’s Whitney Biennial, and Hopinka in the 2017 edition. Sanford Biggers, whose exhibition of quilt-based works at the Bronx Museum of the Arts was set to open yesterday, also won.

Other winners of the prestigious fellowship include the renowned performance artist Clifford Owens; conceptual artist Zoe Leonard, who enjoyed a survey at the Whitney Museum in 2018; Leslie Hewitt, known for works that interrogate the interconnection of sculpture and photography; Barbara Takenaga, an abstract painter of quasi-cosmic vistas; and Ellen Lesperance, whose show at the Baltimore Museum of Art closed early due to COVID-19.

The full list of 2020 fellowship winners can be viewed on the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s website.